Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor
shotcutapp.com
shotcutapp.com
I've used pretty much all amateur video-making software for Windows and some for Mac, Screenflow, FinalCut Pro, etc.
The best by far is FinalCut Pro (Mac-only), because it automatically creates proxy files and allows you to edit everything in real time with no lag, even when adding complicated effects.
The situation on Linux is dismal. The only good one is https://kdenlive.org/. It's actually I'd say at par to FinalCut in terms of performance, although the UI could use some clean up. It's the one I use because the other ones would either keep crashing, or be impossibly slow.
I wonder why (really, have no idea)?
Things Blender capable of for video:
* Advanced graphical node based compositing
* "Effects Strips": Essentially generates a strip in the sequence editor that you can layer above the target media strip. Like using a Photoshop layer for one specific effect.
* Decent audio mixing capabilities
* Fantastic motion tracking (advantage of being built into your creation suite)
Pro Tip: Make sure your output frame rate is the same as the videos you are going to import. Otherwise the audio gets out of sync.
I know on some (probably most) platforms you have to symlink some libs to make it run. Are you maybe just talking about that?
After that, it just crashes with an assertion. It seems that has to do with missing or wrong configs, but there's not much else to be found on google. My configs are present and look fine.
Also, only rpm based distributions are officially supported, but a lot of people hack around that to get it working on Ubuntu (like me).
It's proprietary and the free as in beer version is limited to 720p mp4 ("YouTube") export, which was sufficient for my use case.
The tool started to work on color, but it looks like they've made a decent editor also.
The content was super important stuff - early footage of many areas of the world not otherwise filmed - and was destined for Wikimedia Commons.
It was the worst experience I've ever had with commercial software since Windows 'corrected' an NTFS volume in ~2005 and nixxed the lot. From memory it was something to do with the input codec (beyond my control as lossless was a requirement), the output codec, and the aspect ratio. The software just couldn't cut the stuff. I was left to go back to ffmpeg and VLC. I will never again waste time learning a commercial UI.
It shines with large video asset databases, and once you get a few weeks of muscle memory behind it (or a few months if you're coming from FCP or FCPX), it's a fast tool when making lots of simple cuts. It has a well-earned reputation for cutting stuff like drama and comedy, where effects and pre-rendered sequences take a back seat to well-timed cuts between takes and fast iterative editing feedback. The node-based compositor is... unique, but I'm not sure I'm qualified to say it's an objectively easier or better workflow than AE — YMMV.
It's also capable of doing other things like handling basic A/V effects and compositing, but not as well as other NLEs or compositors. Its best output formats are behind a licensing wall, though they're still far cheaper than Adobe, Apple, or Avid, and you can do almost all your actual cutting with the free version. While it's more stable than some FOSS NLEs, it's still shakier than Avid or Premiere on well-supported hardware, with the distinct advantage that it's got native Linux support.
The weirdest part, though, was that it was supposed to have been open-sourced after EditShare acquired it, then they didn't, and they've been saying "it'll be open sourced when it's ready" for almost 4 years now.[1]
[1] https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&c...
Shotcut wouldn't keep working with XFCE4 Xubuntu 16.04 for me. If I applied any heavier effect it would freeze, then crash.
With even cell phones shooting 4k I would think this would be a standard feature. It's not super complex.
The only tool in Linux that's really decent at editing video isn't even a video editing tool. It's Blender.
For the past few years I've just used Resolve in Windows. I'd be excited to try Shortcut and see if it handled better.
Video editing is a though medium though, even if you're just calling ffmpeg a lot. It's worth watching the Vimeo talk and video encoding and how a lot of cameras and cellphone encoders are so crappy they can change framerates on every frame.
For example with Camtasia, you can click 1 button and have your desktop + audio + optional webcam all being recorded to your video project, and then you can hop in and edit it with a bunch of great tools and presets. This includes complex animations and tooltips with doing nothing more than dragging around a few sliders.
Basically you can get up and going with an excellent work flow as 1 single person who isn't a video editing god.
Where does Shotcut stand compared to that?
At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos. It's all about how fast it is to go from an empty folder to a high production quality video.
Camtasia is one of the only reasons why I run Windows so if your project can solve all of those problems, that would be an incredible feat since Camtasia seems to have no intent on supporting anything but Mac / Windows.
Also if it helps gauge the comparison I have tried kdenlive about 6 months ago and compared to Camtasia I would rate kdenlive a 0.001 and Camtasia a 9.5 on the sole task of "quickly create a nice looking screencast".
There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money.
There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.
This is after having recorded about 50 hours of real-time video over a few years. There's just so many things you absolutely need to be happy and productive when recording -- especially if you plan to do this for a living.
Using a bad video editor (and I'm not saying Shotcut is bad because I haven't installed it yet) is just a really draining and time wasting experience.
It takes me around 70 minutes of real life time to produce 10 minutes of video after years of work flow optimizations and using what I think is one of the best tools available to make screencasts. Almost all of that time is spent editing in Camtasia (stopping and starting the recording, correcting mistakes, adding post-production effects, etc.).
I would love to switch to an open source tool (for many reasons) but the reality of the situation is, I wouldn't switch unless it was remarkable because it's such an important tool if you're livelihood depends on making videos.
Shotcut and Kdenlive are fundamentally video editors, which happen to be able to do screen recording. Camtasia is specifically a screen recorder.
Look at a couple of Youtube videos on Camtasia 9. It is a full fledged editor (and also does audio / video recording too). That's the winning property of it.
You just click a button to start recording, deliver your video content, press stop and then you can immediately start editing your content. Then you export and you're done.
With something like premiere you would have to record your audio and / or video with a different tool and spend a lot of time importing. I also found premier's UI to be crazy complex (in a very non-intuitive way). I haven't tried movie maker.
Camtasia's editing effects are just enough to make really nice screencast style videos without being overwhelming. I've gotten hundreds of positive reviews on my tech courses that were related to the production quality of the videos.
For example, the video on this course page[0] was made fully with Camtasia 9. All of the animations and even the slides / tooltips.
That whale animation and text dropping effect took around 5 minutes to make from scratch once I figured out what I wanted to do. All I had to do was pick some things from a few drop down boxes and drag 2 or 3 sliders around.
Sure, but fundamentally, Camtasia is a screen recorder. It's purpose is to make screencasts. If you were editing video filmed with a camera, you would find Kdenlive, Premiere etc. more useful than Camtasia.
Camtasia works really nicely for doing floating head videos and it has options for dealing with green screens and video touch ups.
That also means it works fine for doing product review videos or vlogging. Basically video coming in from a single source.
It's not comparable to something like after effects but if you just wanted to record something with a video camera then Camtasia will work no problem for both the recording and the editing of that video.
All of its animations, transitions, zoom, panning and pop up tooltips can be applied to that film recording just like you could with a screencast recording.
You can even combine both that film recording with your screen recording as different tracks. It really is a versatile product for all things related to creating videos.
I'm not affiliated with Camtasia either, and I would switch to an OS solution immediately if something existed that was comparable but the only tool that I know of that is remotely close is Screenflow and it's MacOS only + paid, so it's basically just a direct competitor to Camtasia (Camtasia runs on MacOS too, and its project files are compatible with both Windows and MacOS).
There are some closed source options out there like Lightworks that are decent.
May I suggest working on your logo and loosing the AdSense ads on your page? Unfortunately, AdSense ads are borderline malware these days. I got one for MacKeeper and another for a fishy VPN.
As for me, I edit a lot more videos, and I spend a quite of time on doing it. I've tried to work with a lot of different FOSS video editors, except Blender, and my conclusion was always the same -- it's usable, but a little rough on the edge, and has just enough minor bugs or quirks to be irritating and sometimes frustrating. I'm not talking about just crashes, since that happens on all video editors even on Premiere Pro.
Video editing is somewhat similar to coding, as it requires a lot of concentration, intensity, and creativity... There's nothing more frustrating than having the software/tools that gets in your way and block your flow and progress. Also time is money in video production house, often with tight deadlines. Some wedding videographers are offering same-day edits, which sounds insane to me, since video editing takes a lot of time. As for me, it takes about 7 hours to edit 1 hour video.
Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve 14 (on both Mac and Windows but haven't used on Linux yet). So far, it has worked surprisingly well. I really like the built-in audio editing and coloring tools. All this is free, with exception of some features for pro/studio version.
Some have complained the lack of h264/265 import on Linux version of Davinci Resolve, but you can always transcode to "pseudo-lossless" codec such as DNxHR/DNxHD (or ProRes if on Mac) using ffmpeg first. This step is usually automated using script to convert raw footage. Most pro workflow also involves this extra step, because editing on h264 source is really painfully slow and inefficient.
As a side note, the last time I checked, in LA/Hollywood, Avid was still the king of editor, but it may be changing. Anywhere except Hollywood, Premiere Pro CC is definitely the most popular editor, especially when it's used in conjunction with After Effects. However, I didn't need AE and I didn't like subscription-based payment model. Avid Composer First is free version of Avid, but it can't output 4k, and Avid UI is horrible.
> Davinci Resolve, but you can always transcode to "pseudo-lossless"
> codec such as DNxHR/DNxHD (or ProRes if on Mac) using ffmpeg first. This
> step is usually automated using script to convert raw footage. Most pro
> workflow also involves this extra step, because editing on h264 source is
> really painfully slow and inefficient.
The preferred workflow would be import h264, edit using proxies, then render the result from the original files. A pro workflow shouldn't involve a gratuitous transcoding step. Mind you a real pro workflow wouldn't involve ingesting h264 files at all.
But it might be true that I should just get over myself and transcode the files before editing.
It is better than iMovie in this regard because it doesn't require copying the giant file into some "project" directory like iMovie seems to.
This is my biggest gripe with iMovie. You need to have double the space just to start editing.
I guess their idea was to allow users to move their video files around and delete them at will without being able to mess up the iMovie project.
However, iMovie has great screen transitions. Is there any other free or open source program that compares in that regard?
Its simple, functional, and does exactly what I need to do: cut, arrange, and splice clips and audio and export video.
I'm not going to say its the best, I'd really like to have the ability to dub in app instead of running audacity in the background, and I find its ability to put titles and text kinda wonky.
But its a simple tool that does exactly what I need to do and is Open Source.
At the moment, it is pretty unclear of the exact install process!
If you're on Ubuntu or similar, then once you're running it you can right click on the Icon and choose "Lock to launcher"
Anybody got a link to a comparison between this and iMovie? "Shortcut" seems to be quite ungoogleable.
Works well for the mp4 streams from my helmet camera, reliable key frames etc. For video that's been more highly compressed you'll need to compromise on the cut points if you want to avoid reencoding. And the cuts are abrupt, no fades or transitions.
The aged virtualdub does this as long as the container is avi (the codec could be avc/h.264 etc). I used avidemux to convert mp4 to avi without reencoding (just change the container format), then use virtualdub to trim it.
Actually I just write time stamps in a text file then use a groovy script to generate a script can be read by virtualdub, run virtualdub with the script to do the trimming.
It has worked for me for many years.
Not free but cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
If you need more resolution, you can apply more tricks, recompose i-frames from the same data, etc.
Kdenlive is another foss editor based on MLT, like Shotcut.
It's a shame that interop with Shotcut isn't great, even though both save their projects as MLT XML. I think there's just one property that you need to add to a Kdenlive XML to make it readable by Shotcut (something like shotcut="1"). That said, I think Shotcut makes much cleaner XMLs.
Tried Davinci Resolve as well. I generally like it, but find it less intuitive to use than Kdenlive (surprisingly, given one is commercial and the other is open source).
One thing I'm working on in my spare time is a MLT <-> FCPXML converter. I collaborate with people who use Final Cut Pro or Premiere, so it will be necessary to exchange projects both ways. I'm surprised that none of the open source video editors support this natively :(
Initially Davinci Resolve was born a color grading tool, not a non-linear editor (that's why there a whole tab dedicated to color). The NLE capabilities were added after it was bought by Black Magic Design. That may explain this lack of intuitiveness.
You must have a very powerful machine. I don't have many crashes when working on high end custom built machines, but they do happen.
From most stable to least stable for me have been:
1) Lightworks (2010 announced they were moving to Open Sourcing the code, still hasn't really happened) It has been used for decades now to make Oscar winning films. If you understand the analog way of editing video this makes a lot more sense. Its basically free but has a HUGE learning curve
2) DaVinci Resolve (Most people use it only for color correction but they have added editing recently) My preferred and the one I recommend to everyone when asked what to use.
3) Sony now Magix Vegas Pro - My previously recommended and preferred video editor does a great job on keeping the work flow the work flow and not getting in your way (Lightworks actually does this best but man it is hard to get through the learning curve)
4) Adobe Premier - This thing is a BEAST but it is the defacto standard. Moderate learning curve but it is cross compatible and has every tool available. Great eco-system.
105) Final Cut Pro - I cringe when I have to use it. Only reason this thing has such a following is it is so hard to learn another video editor. Premier was the standard and somehow Final Cut Pro took over around 2008. Boy I really never liked it, but I was always in the minority till the Final Cut X came out. I have lost hours of work and I have also lost hours of work because case sensitivity is optional on OS X and MacOS.
I must admit, I've not really heard of Adobe being used in professional editing contexts. With a little research I've found some articles suggesting the BBC was standardising on Adobe Premiere[1]. Article is from 2010, but I can't confirm that happened though. I left that organisation in 2011 and at that time, I was managing a number of Mac based editing suites with Final Cut Pro (FCP).
I then ran a post-production company in London. We had suites full of Avid Media Composer and one solitary FCP, because some people refused to use anything else. (Also had a Baselight grading suite and Avid ProTools in the audio suites). We never considered Adobe Premiere and I can't, off the top of my head, recall any other post- house using it either.
[1] http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0002/bbc-adopts-adobe-premi...
We went from Avid in the early/mid 2000's to Final Cut Pro on Mac Pros (in the cheese grater days) to Premiere Pro on Windows workstations which I still use today. First we switched away from FCP when Mac Pros languished and FCPX tossed out a lot of the features we needed. I understand that a lot of those were later replaced but at the time it was a dealbreaker.
With Premiere, we can edit on either MacOS or Windows workstations, performance is good on a properly equipped machine, and it integrates well with the other tools in the suite like Audition, After Effects, and their still-image stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator when needed.
It's not going to work for everyone and I'm still not a fan of the subscription model (much prefer the old way where I'd spend $600 or whatever every few years and be done with it). That said, it doesn't surprise me to see it getting professional use, just as it doesn't surprise me that other production houses find FCPX to be a better fit for their equipment and workflow.
I've looked at Lightworks before, but it looks like the free version only exports up to 720p? If that's the case, that's an immediate deal-breaker :(
I would just convert your H264 into a supported format and avoid ProRes if you don't have a lot of RAM and drive space since it makes the compressed H.264 files really big for no real gain. The one HUGE thing is you want your H264 to be in I Frame were each frame is an indvidual frame and makes your CPU use more effecient (Hand brake would be constant framerate). (That is why people go to ProRes it is i frame native BUT it makes the file HUGE and your re-compressing your already compressed files). On windows you would use something like DNxHD but again it is a HUGE file from H.264 source. Ratio s to size RAW 1:1 and ProRess would be 1:4 in size and H.264 would be around 1:0.4
You really want an editing format (i frame) and a delivery format. For editing a x264 lossless works when you are starting with a H.264 source. Unless you are on MacOS there are serious issues with encoding anything ProRes with ffmpeg, handbrake or anything else. Also ProRes file sizes are HUGE (Think 10 times) and I can't see this codec being the future for 4K. Here is a good blog post on H264 and slices http://gentlelogic.blogspot.com/2011/11/exploring-h264-part-...
Here is Apple's official policy with ProRes with anything decoding anything other than Apple Products (ProRes is NOT cross-compatible because you can't encode it other than MacOS):
> “Using any unauthorized implementation (like the FFmpeg and derivative implementations) may lead to decoding errors, performance degradation, incompatibility, and instability.” This is why I avoid ProRes and try to use different i frame codecs.
Davinci supports the following formats inside of the H264 container
H.264 8 bit MPEG4/MP4 (This is what I would target with i frame slices for editing AKA every frame is a indvidual picture)
H.264 QuickTime/MOV
H.264 (Sony XAVCs) QuickTime MP4 (XAVC MIGHT be the future for 4K codec but everyone has their own codecs right now)
So I would use handbrake to just change it to one of those formats. Once you have glitch free playback save your settings and just a one button operation after that. I rarely have a project that I am not converting my source material first anyways and sometimes my whole job on a project is to clean, process and label the video and audio so someone else can edit. Its a pain and it's called an assistant editor.
> second that it had some inexplicable rendering glitches in the output (visibly glitchy and corrupted frames)
Welcome to Codecs they suck right now and have always sucked. I don't use ProRes because I don't rely on Apple standards due to cross compatibility and Apple seems to just make one's life messerable for no reason every blue moon or so. So when you are exporting you actually have to make sure your source is consistant and if it isn't your going to have issues in playback.
When people tell me the editor is not smooth it is 95% of the time the materials codecs. If you don't have consistent frame rate aka 24 frames per minute your computer is decompressing the video while you are edniting and previewing it. Compressed video for playback normally has a variable playback rate to save the file size and it isn't really an issue except while editing video. So you have the consistent frame rate for editing and a variable frame rate for export. So even though you have an export issue it actually is a transcode issue with your source material, normally.
Final Cut Pro was my first video editor. When X came out, I couldn't stand it. I hated how a lot of Apple fanboys just started apologizing for it. But it was good in a way that it forced the rest of the market to step up its game. I'm glad a lot of studies decided to move away from it. It pretty much turned into iMovie Pro.
Conan O'Brien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKYuF9pENQ
>> They are unstable because they require huge amount of resources ...
This actually is not enough of a reason in theory for the programs to crash. The programs should stop the processing when they run out of resources and allow a graceful exit.
The root cause for crashes then, I am guessing, must be lousy code. Either the entire video editing industry has gotten used to it, so that they are not demanding better solutions and thereby the product companies are not prioritizing fixing these crashes, OR, there are some common libraries that they all using which crash, and these product companies feel helpless. Hopefully someone knows the actual answer! :-)
Huh? Almost every application just panics when it runs out of memory. Not least because it's actually difficult to do stuff without using memory within typical application frameworks.
When I was at college more than a decade back, I tested many applications under such conditions and my own application too. Most Microsoft's applications survived even with less than 100 bytes of RAM remaining and a disabled virtual memory! This included Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, et al. My own application survived too with a fix or two. Windows Explorer, funnily, crashed. Many non-Microsoft applications crashed.
More recently (2012), I tested two commercial Java profiler applications, JProfiler and Yourkit. They both survived without issues under such conditions.
I'm looking for a timeline editor in javascript which allows me to build an object to pass to ffmpeg to inject content at certain intervals.
Much like what gifs.com [0] does.
I have found this [1]: but it's not really what I am looking for.
If anyone has come across something similar, let me know. Thanks